Installation

Introduction

While MidnightBSD plans to target moderate and novice users, currently installation
is too difficult for beginners to *NIX like operating systems. Experience with BSD,
Linux, or another *NIX like system is very helpful. FreeBSD users familiar with
sysinstall should have no problem with this procedure. You may also consult the
MidnightBSD wiki or
FreeBSD Handbook for additional information
not found on this page.

Preparing For Installation

You may download MidnightBSD from our FTP server or any mirrors, provided that you have a
broadband internet connection. You will need disk 1 of a release or snapshot in order to install MidnightBSD.

You will need free space on your hard drive. While the system runs very well on a few gigabytes of disk space, we recommend at least
15GB of space for use with mports on a desktop. An Intel Pentium class computer or equivalent is required. We have removed 486 support
from the default install, although it can be compiled in. At least 48MB of RAM is required for installation.

Depending on your needs, various graphics cards are supported at different levels. Many network cards are
supported as well as a few wireless network cards. We will document them at a later time.
Many onboard audio controllers are supported as well as other cards like the
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy and Audigy 2 families.

MidnightBSD can co-exist with Microsoft Windows or Linux on the same disk. It is
recommended that you use GRUB from Linux if you wish to dual boot MidnightBSD with Linux.
For Windows, the included boot manager is sufficient. (Windows XP was tested). Third
party boot managers such as System Commander 8.20 are supported as well. I currently dual boot
Windows XP SP2 and MidnightBSD with System Commander on my primary desktop. With Windows Vista,
you should use the boot manager included with Vista (and the boot1 file from CD)
or a third party boot manager such as gag. The included one with not work with Vista (overwrites it)

You may also install MidnightBSD using a virtualization product such as qemu, Microsoft Virtual PC, or VMware. Parallels has not been tested to my knowledge.

You will need to burn a copy of the Disk 1 iso from our FTP server using your
favorite CD burning software. If you need to download burning software,
LiquidCD for Mac OS X, and
InfraRecorder for Windows XP are both free and easy to use.
Also, on OS X, you can burn with Disk Utility. For FreeBSD or MidnightBSD, you can
use burncd (part of os).

Installing MidnightBSD

Insert the MidnightBSD CD into your CD-ROM drive and start up your PC. On some
systems, you may need to enter the BIOS to enable booting from the CD-ROM drive first.
On some systems, there is a button you can push to select the CD-ROM drive. For instance,
on some Dell systems you can press F12 and then pick the CD-ROM drive.

You should see a red and blue screen come up after a few moments preceded by a lot
of white and black text. If several minutes pass with no activity and you do not see
this screen, please report it. There maybe a bug or an incompatibility with your
system we can work to fix.

From this point, you may follow the steps in sysinstall to complete installation.
On snapshots, X11 (XORG) and packages are not present. Do not attempt to install
these items or you will receive errors. We hope to resolve this by 0.2 release.

You may follow along with the BSD Magazine article on
installing MidnightBSD. in the August 2010 issue. This procedure covers 0.1-RELEASE - 0.3-RELEASE. 0.4 installs are a bit different. There are also some YouTube videos available for older releases.

Virtual PC for Windows works as expected. VPC 7 for Mac OS X
works except the CDROM drive is "lost" during install. If you can get it installed using ftp install,
it will work fine. Note, you must install 0.1.1 from FTP and then
upgrade to 0.2 as sysinstall FTP installation is broken in 0.2.1

VMware

Works

VMware player works under Windows Vista or XP. VMware Fusion on Mac OS X
runs MidnightBSD as expected. Unable to install the vmware-tools for better performance.

Sun Netra T1

Works

You must use the 0.1 snap and then update to 0.2.1 release. We want
to support these again come 0.3. One is a T1 105. Systems have 512MB and 768MB RAM,
SCSI disks, one has an IDE cdrom drive. Onboard NICs work.

Qemu

Works

One of our developers uses qemu with the system. It is included in mports.

Parallels

Works

Parallels 3 or 4 work with MidnightBSD. Releases were tested on Parallels
first actually. 0.4's SMP support works. Mac or PC versions.

IBM Thinkpad T30

Works

Sound, video, NIC, DVD all work. System won't sleep and LCD won't
turn off. This model has the "pointer stick" and does not have built in
wifi. Using ndis with a broadcom wireless NIC works.

Asus M4A78 Plus Motherboard + AMD Phenom 9600

Does not work

USB controller causes panics, freezes. Must disable USB 2 in bios to boot.
Onboard NIC not supported and must be disabled. System supported otherwise.

iMac 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo with 3GB RAM. (silver/black model) Feb 2008

Mostly works

Wifi is not supported, although may work with NDIS drivers from bootcamp.
Will boot off live cd without problem. Onboard NIC supported in 0.2.1-RELEASE or
CURRENT. wifi might work in current with SMP disabled using bwi(4). Sound untested.

Virtual PC for Windows works as expected. VPC 7 for Mac OS X works
except the CDROM drive is "lost" during install. If you can get it installed
using ftp install, it will work fine.

VMware

Works

VMware player works under Windows Vista. VMware Fusion on Mac OS X runs
MidnightBSD as expected. Unable to install the vmware-tools for better performance.

Sun Ultra 10 3D creator

Works

Early releases were tested on a Sun Ultra 10 3D creator. The system died however. Last known working release was 0.1.1.

Qemu

Works

One of our developers uses qemu often with the system. It is included in mports.
I believe he's also run MidnightBSD virtualized inside of OpenBSD.

In general, if hardware worked in FreeBSD 6.0 Release it will most likely work in MidnightBSD.
Some drivers were imported from FreeBSD 6.1 beta, 6.1 Release and 6.2. 0.3-CURRENT
includes drivers from FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. We've also added support for several other systems such as network cards found in Intel based iMacs, newer AMD, Intel and NVIDIA SATA chipsets, and fixes for Apple mice.